The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice
Abstract
Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.
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We acknowledge the support of research grant BCS-0722132 from NSF to D.T.G. and T.D.W.
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Science
Volume 323 | Issue 5921
20 March 2009
20 March 2009
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 30 September 2008
Accepted: 5 February 2009
Published in print: 20 March 2009
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www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5921/1617/DC1
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